Desicritics Author: Ajay

The Road to Hell is Paved With Bad Intentions

Ajay — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 11:13:20 EST

I've been silent over the reservation row that has (en)raged this country for nearly a year now, until today...

Today the Lok Sabha passed the OBC Quota Bill. The Bill proposes 27 percent reservations for Other Backward Classes (OBC) in Central Government-aided higher educational institutions, including premier institutions like the IIMs and the IITs. What is even worse is that this will include the Creamy Layer which in simple terms means the well-to-do OBCs.

The reservation proposal started because of one old man Mr. Arjun Singh who needed something bring his political career into the limelight.

What innovative way other than do something that creates controversy. What better method that to divide our already fragile country.

I am totally against reservations, but understand at times that this can help. However, what is beyond me is why do reservations have to be caste based. Why can't they be economic based?

For those who haven't read my blog earlier, I am a Catholic from a middle class family. I have always fallen in the Open Category. This has meant that throughout my life I have had to struggle to achieve even the bare minimum.

I remember very distinctly in SSC (Tenth) when filling up the forms how out of the blue several off my classmates turned out to be from reserved categories. It was strange because when they took admission they were in the general category.

These same persons today passed out from premier institutions because of or relaxed rules for reserved category students. It was (and still is) really frustrating because I always performed better them.

Our country received its freedom in 1947, i.e. nearly 60 years ago. Reservations were started some time later and were to be held for a period of 10 years. When will those 10 years finish?
If the persons in the reserved category still haven't progressed, do you think that they will progress today?

With the passing of the Bill today what I expected indeed came through. After all who cares about the millions of students slogging it out everyday? Who cares about the General Category anymore?

I would really like to see reservations for us Open Category students. At least that way I will be assured of a seat.

And if you think that things won't get worse, the same old man now intends to introduce a bill that will enforce quotas in unaided institutions as well as Private Sector companies.

There goes our Country down the drain. Or should I say watch it continue going down?

And they wonder why everyone is leaving the country and running away!

Popularity on the World Wide Web: How Do You Measure It?

Ajay — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 00:18:45 EDT

I haven't been very active in the Indian Blogosphere and so missed the entire discussion over Kiruba being the No. 1 blogger in India (according to Blogstreet).

Patrix has expressed his opinion on Popularity in the Indian Blogosphere. He goes on to list several Indian blogs (including mine) according to their Technorati Ranking.

His post did get me thinking.

Popularity can be defined as the quality of being widely admired or accepted or sought after.

But, how does this translate in the WWW? How do we measure popularity? What are the various methods today? Are they reliable?

Technorati

Today, a lot of methods exist for measuring popularity. One, like Patrix pointed out is, to use Technorati's Ranking.

Technorati ranks blogs based on the number of incoming links. This rank is updated several times a day and only considers active links from the past six months. As of today, Technorati tracks around 50.9 million blogs!
A point to note is that the incoming links don't just belong to posts or blogrolls, but also from credit lines (e.g. like that of my Connections Reloaded Theme).

Alexa
Another method of gauging popularity is Alexa Traffic Rank.

Alexa's ranking system has been online from as far as I can remember! Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. They have a page detailing the process.

This is a stark difference from that of Technorati. Having a higher traffic rank is a more accurate sign of your sites popularity because it measures the number of users actually visiting your site. However, Alexa ranks can be slightly inaccurate because it depends on users of their toolbar.

Top Sites
Top Sites are often used to compare the popularity of blogs with respect to one another. There are way too many top sites run by way too many people. A few well known ones are Blog Top Sites, Top100 Bloggers, RankingBlogs.com and Indian Bloggers.

While Top100 rates people on the number of votes they receive or the number of users visiting Top100 from the blog (which in my opinion is an highly inaccurate method of rating), the other three rate the blogs solely on the basis of unique visitors (i.e. traffic) which is how it should be!

Feed Subscriptions
A good way of ascertaining popularity is by looking at the number of feed subscriptions. e.g. Feedburner gives you buttons that let you display the number of subscribers to your feed.
This, however can't be a sure-shot method because you may have a lot of subscribers but no readers. Yet again, this doesn't track the actual traffic that the site receives. Additionally, it only tracks those who have signed up for the service and put the code on their site.

No. of Comments
Visitor interactivity in terms of number of comments that the posts receive is another way to find out how popular a blog is. This can also be further used to determining visitor loyalty to understand how many repeat commenters are present.

And yet again, this isn't the best way, because you could have a lot of visitors who love reading your blog but would not want to comment on it.

To conclude there are several ways to determine blog popularity. However, all of these methods may not give the same results. So which method should we actually adopt?

Give me your opinion
Which method would you use from the above? Do you have still another way of measuring blog popularity? Or have do you believe that since your blog is personal, you don't really care about how popular it is?

Join the discussion below or blog about your opinion.

And just a note to us Indian Bloggers. Let's quit the squabble about who is No. 1 in the Indian blogosphere and look beyond. There is a whole world of bloggers out there.

Movie Review: Poseidon

Ajay — Tue, 16 May 2006 11:59:17 EDT

On New Year night, Poseidon, the luxurious cruise liner was hit by a majestic rogue wave flipping it upside down. With help several hours away most of the passengers decide to sit it out. However, Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) decides to get off the already sinking ship, by climbing to the hull (now on top). He is joined by Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett) and her son Conor (Jimmy Bennett), Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel), Elena Gonzalez (M�a Maestro) and Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss).
Will they all make it out before the ship sinks?

The remake of Poseidon borrows it's storyline from The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and so you do know the initial part of the story.

I am glad that they didn't stick to it completely, or you would have had a remake of the original with special effects.

Speaking of the special effects, they rocked! It is also the main reason you actually should go out for the movie.

The entire scene right from the generation of the tidal wave, to it striking the boat, to the capcize, the overturning and finally the blackout are amazing. They kept me glued to the screen with my mouth open!

The depiction of the dead bodies is also done really well. Some of them really made me squirm in my seat! It surprises me how the actors managed to work around them! :O

Coming to the acting ... well it failed to impress.

While Josh Lucas does a great job and Emmy is really gorgeous (lucky Mike ;) ), the other actors didn't perform so well that it would make you want to give them an award.

The end was of course predictable, as were most scenes in the movie.

There are a lot of questionable parts of the movie, which definitely need more explanation. I won't call them goofs but just scenes that just didn't seem possible nor sensible.

I would not like to elaborate on this as it will make this review will be a spoiler.

Overall, a decent movie. Worth watching once, for the special effects.

My rating: 6/10

A Nightmare in Public Transport

Ajay — Mon, 15 May 2006 00:18:28 EDT

I had to attend my Grandma's birthday party last evening and since my bike was giving problems I decided to use public transport to get back home from work.

I left my workplace a little after 3.30pm and hitched a ride with a colleague heading towards Thane. His plans changed and I had to get off at Rabale and find a bus or auto heading towards Airoli.

For those who aren't aware, the transport in Navi Mumbai SUCKS!

After a good deal of waiting a 513 arrived and I jumped in as it heads towards Mulund.

Instead of getting off at Airoli, which I am familiar with, I went upto Mulund (E). My first mistake.

I climbed over the correct bridge at Mulund to get to the West and started off in the wrong direction. I asked a traffic cop who pointed me towards the bus stops. I reached there, searched and asked and found the correct stop.

I got into a 398 and asked the conductor for Chakala and he told me it goes only to Marol and asked me to get off. Second mistake!

I got off at the next stop only to be caught by the ticket collector (TC). Argued a great deal with the TC in Hindi. But I was getting late and will admit that for the TC, I was in the wrong. I finally paid off the small fine.

For those who don't understand Marathi, it says that I had to pay a fine for travelling ticketless.

I still maintain that the conductor is largely to blame. And I am pissed off not being clear before boarding the bus and also for getting off, because incidently the 398 did go to where I wanted to!

I got the TC to tell me the correct bus no. and bus-stop and I finally found the right one. It was already past 5.30pm.

The bus journey took me more than an hour and I reached home a little before seven.

Got ready in a hurry and left for the party, strongly vowing to not travel by public transport again, unless I have no option!